About noon the next day, David requested speech with his chief.

"Well?" said Uriah. The old man looked worn and feeble. He had had a
sorrowful night.

"I haven't had a vacation in a year," said David. "Will you give me
three weeks, sir?"

"Want to go back East and pay off your obligations?"

David nodded.

"I have the money and interest in hand," said he.

Mr. Grey smiled.

"I suppose you'll come back smoking like a chimney, drinking like a
fish, betting like a book-maker, and keeping a whole chorus in
picture-hats."

"I think I'll not even smoke," said David. "About a month ago the last
traces of hankering left me, and I feel like a free man at last."

"But you'll be making love right and left," said Mr. Grey cheerfully,
but with a shrewd eye upon the young man's expression of face.

David looked grave and troubled. He appeared to be turning over
difficult matters in his mind. Then he smiled gayly.

"At least I shall be free to make love if I want to."

"Nonsense," said Mr. Grey. "People don't make love because they want to.
They do it because they have to."

Again David looked troubled, and a little sad, perhaps.

"True," said he. And he walked meditatively back to his own desk, took
up a pen, meditated for a long time, and then wrote:

Best friend that any man ever had in the world! I shall be in
Aiken on the twenty-fifth, bringing with me that which I owe, and
can pay, and deeply conscious of that deeper debt that I owe, but
never can hope to pay. But I will do what I can. I will not now
take back the promises I gave, unless you wish; I will not do
anything that you do not wish. And if all the service and devotion
that is in me for the rest of time seem worth having to you, they
are yours. But you know that.

DAVID.

This, looking white, tired, and austere, he reread, folded, enveloped,
stamped, sealed, and addressed to Miss Tennant.

Neither the hand which Miss Tennant laid on his, nor the cigarette which
she lighted for him, completely mollified Mr. Billy McAllen. He was no
longer young enough to dance with pleasure to a maiden's whims. The
experience of dancing from New York to Newport and back, and over the
deep ocean and back, and up and down Europe and back with the late Mrs.
McAllen--now Mrs. Jimmie Greenleaf--had sufficed. He would walk to the
altar any day with Miss Tennant, but he would not dance.

"You have so many secrets with y